Zoyd

[John Carvill]

> Slothrop, incidentally, remains my favourite of all Pynchon's characters.

Yeah, gotta love that Tyrone. For me, Zoyd comes close.

> Which is why it still seems so disturbing when Slothrop simply dissolves towards
> the end....
> The trick wouldn't have worked so well and the shock wouldn't
> have been so great in AtD, which has nothing BUT supporting characters.
>

Right. In fact, the reader of ATD experiences a sort of long drawn out
version of that 'protagonist dissolution shock'. I kept waiting for
things to coalesce and cohere and they never really did. I still love
the book, still rate it a work of genius, but that incoherence was
definitely not a plus-point.